Systems Risk & Safety Lead

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

3h•Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations. Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe. We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds. We are looking for a System Risk & Safety Engineer to own and evolve the end‑to‑end risk and safety strategy for Zipline’s aircraft and operations. This is a senior technical leadership role with real authority: you will define what “acceptably safe” means for our systems, ensure we stay ahead of operational scale, and act as a steward of safety across engineering, operations, and the company as a whole. We start from the risk and the safety target, not from standards. Standards and guidance inform our work, but they do not define safety. This role requires first‑principles thinking, quantitative risk ownership, and the judgment to make difficult safety and risk decisions. This role is not advisory. You will own the quantitative safety case, drive top‑down safety analyses, and ensure learning from operations continuously feeds back into engineering priorities. Patients, partners, regulators, and the communities we serve rely on us to get this right.

Requirements

BS and/or MS in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related field
8+ years of experience delivering safety‑critical electromechanical systems into real‑world operation
Demonstrated ownership of system‑level safety analysis and decision‑making
Strong first‑principles reasoning in the absence of complete regulations or industry guidance
Experience with hazard analysis techniques such as fault trees, FMEA, and risk modeling
Comfort engaging deeply with data, models, and operational evidence when needed
Experience in cross-functional technical leadership of safety critical autonomous systems

Nice To Haves

Experience working at the intersection of engineering design and live operations
Exposure to regulator‑facing safety cases or certification efforts
Experience scaling cross-functional Safety Management Systems

Responsibilities

Own the quantitative safety case, including decomposition of top-level safety objectives into system requirements, allocations, and operational limitations
Own top-down fault tree analysis for safety-related events and hazards, including budget allocation and margin tracking
Ensure safety analyses remain valid as designs, operations, and scale evolve by monitoring current and emerging risks
Ensure Zipline learns everything possible from test and commercial events, pulling corrective and preventive actions into engineering and operational priorities
Grow and lead a small but mighty System Risk and Safety Engineering team
Act as the technical owner for external safety communication, in partnership with certification, legal, and communications teams
Proactively establish Zipline as an industry leader in safety transparency and trust
Provide clear, technically grounded support for reactive communications in response to incidents